It is November 8th, 2011 and what would you expect a young college male to be doing right now? Playing the new Call of Duty of course. Instead, I'm going to blog about this Rollingstones magazine I bought earlier. I'm supposed to compare the old-media print version to the new-media online website of the magazine so here it goes.
http://www.rollingstone.com/
1) The primary focus of this publication is music. It also covers some politics, movies & TV, and contains reviews. On the issue of Rollingstone that I got, there were stories of artists going and performing at occupy wall street, an interview with Eddie Murphey about coming back to adult humor in his new movie that just came out, and "the one and only hot list 2011" was labeled the special section.
The articles start off with lots of little short ones in the beginning. The middle has a couple long headline articles, and the end goes back to short articles arranged on the page.
There is a good amount of photos per page. The colors are really interesting because it seems to be mostly red trim around things with the occasional blue and then black and grey make up most pages.
Some of the ads that make up this magazine are American Spirit cigarettes, Patron tequila, Norton Internet Security, and some varieties of expensive cologne (Chanel, Gucci, L'Homme Libre). It appears to be 40-50% ads.
The three main differences between the print version and the online version that I saw were:
1) There are blogs available that you can follow and read right on the right side of the main page of the website.
2) Overall more content under each section on the website. There is a "Best ever" list (http://www.rollingstone.com/lists) as well as more politics options right in the center of the main page.
3) There is a "latest news" reel on the left of the main page that will refresh and give you new stories to look at like Facebook does in a way.
Here is a link to the issue of Rollingstone that I read.
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/eddie-murphy-speaks-why-he-s-quitting-family-movies-and-may-return-to-stand-up-20111026
2) I think that Rollingstone sets itself apart from the competition by having a very neat and well organized looking print edition. It is also the only music gossip magazine I really know of. The edition of Rollingstone that I read covered a lot of music artist activity and gossip. They don't mention Kim Kardashian, but they did mention Bill Clinton's birthday bash a few times. The articles cover lots of bands releasing LP's and also talks about new actors / actresses a lot.
The two biggest strengths of the print copy of Rollingstone are:
1) With the headlines and the cover picture / story you can tell what type of things you will be reading in the issue. They have laid stories out in front of you to read. Some people are scared to (or sometimes cant) browse through the mass selection of online stories that you see on the website.
2) It is a very organized magazine and it is not full of random colors that distract you.
The two biggest weaknesses I see with the print copy of Rollingstone are:
1) Lots of stories go on to one page and they do a good job of organizing but it still seems a little cluttered.
2) A majority of the stories focus on music artists coming out with new LP's. It had only a couple political articles in it. However, length is an issue and they are supposed to be a music magazine.
The two biggest strengths of the online copy of Rollingstone are:
1) Variety is the first thing to note, obviously.
2) The blogs that you can read and follow are cool because it can lead you to even more people who blog that you may want to follow. This is the link to one of my favorite blogs which is almost a week old. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/pakistan-moves-nukes-in-everyday-trucks-20111104
The two biggest weaknesses of the online copy of Rollingstone are:
1) You have to find and click on all the stories you want to see. It is possible you could miss one that an editor would put in the magazine which you would see otherwise.
2) All the ads (at least on the main page) are the same!
3) The primary target audience for this magazine would be young adult male or females who like to gossip about musical artists and actors / actresses. The ads in the print copy matched very well. The cool thing to do is drink patron and smoke cigarettes, right? The online version had a lot of Sony ads, which may or may not mean much to people of that age group. There weren't any offensive messages in this issue unless you consider "The Return of Beavis & Butt-Head" to be offensive.
4) I almost prefer the print version of this magazine just because I don't know, or bother to learn, a lot about the scene anyhow. When I look at the cover I get an idea of what the main story is, and then I can look at some other headlines to see what else I want to read. When you look online you just get hammered with choices (which isn't a bad thing if you want to explore all those choices).
The online version better serves its audience. They can access old topics and they can narrow their reading to the topics (or niches of topics) they desire. Collecting these magazines for reference purposes would take up way too much space so the internet is the winner here.
5) I chose not to follow Rollingstone on Twitter or Facebook because I don't have too much an interest in the magazine. I did learn about the past of Eddie Murphey and I learned about some of the new actors and actresses and their come-ups as well.
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